Ho-hum. Just another slow night in NOLA last night:

Cocktails by the best people in the bar biz amidst an exhibit of Mardi Gras art and artifacts, plus live jazz, at the Presbytere. Tequila cocktails played a big role here. Misty Kalkofen mixed Don Julio blanco, Fernet Branca, simple syrup infused with cocoa and Mexican smoked salt, and grated coffee bean; Jim Meehan mixed Cuervo Reserva, Benedictine, lime juice, fig jam and dry sack sherry; and John Myers offered up a tequila drink whose recipe completely escapes me but which was real tasty.

Fried chicken, jambalaya and Abita Restoration ale at Coop’s Place on Decatur.

More tequila cocktails (with St. Germain) at an impromptu fete on the steps of the New Orleans Court House on Royal St., accompanied by a traditional New Orleans jazz band.

And the capper: dancing and High Lifes at Vaughan’s in the Bywater with Kermit Ruffin’s R&B band doing their every-Thursday-night thing. They fittingly began their second set with a little Michael Jackson medley. A dozen or so of my fellow Boston folk turned up for the festivities. What fun!

I come to Tales every year for one reason: it’s fun. In fact, so far this year it has been heavenly. Take this exact moment: I’m in the media suite (yes, we have our own suite this year on the top floor of the Monteleone — check out that view!), and a man named Dustin just handed me a drink (yes, there is a bar in the suite, complete with Kold Draft ice!). G’Vine gin, Dimmi Liquore di Milano, guava puree and Fontanelle Prosecco. This is livin’.

Yesterday I had two excellent lunches. Muffalatta and Pimm’s Cups at the Napoleon House, then over to Cochon for pork, rabbit livers, oyster roast, gumbo, catfish and Abita Restoration Pale Ale and cherry bounce old-fashioneds. Later, welcome reception by Beefeater 24 gin at the brand-spanking new Roosevelt Hotel. Audrey Saunders was pouring White Ladies (with egg white!), which were delicious and strong. Afterward, rendezvous with friends at the Sazerac Bar (Sazeracs & Blood and Sands) in the Roosevelt. Wait there’s more: a quick visit to the Saturn Bar before finishing the night at Mimi’s.

Yes, this is livin’. And I’m here for five more days!

Lauren Clark is the publisher of drinkboston.com (Bars, bartenders and imbibing in Beantown), a freelance drinks journalist and a former bartender and brewer.

So, you failed to heed the advice in How to drink all day at Tales without getting (too) drunk? Time to break out the hangover remedies, my friend.

What richer subject is there for armchair physicians — and philosophers — than The Hangover? There are almost as many kinds of hangovers, and almost as many ways of heading them off, bludgeoning them into submission or bowing down before them in misery, as there are drinkers.

Last year, a New Yorker article dug deep into the world of hangover remedies, dividing them into two major types: folk (Russians swear by pickle juice and vodka) and pharmaceutical (preventive pills like RU-21 — get it?). Pickle juice and vodka? Yow. When it comes to folk remedies, I’ll stick with eggs and BC Headache Powder. Or… a steaming hot shower. A dip in an ice-cold pond. A double espresso. A nap. (As for preventive pills — that’s cheating!)

When we talk hangover cures, one thing becomes clear: they’re all primitive. And the prospect of more sophisticated treatment options is dim. That’s because no upstanding research institution is willing to do what it takes to find a silver bullet for the effects of overconsumption: bankroll a massive study involving a large population of drunken (read: difficult to control) human test subjects who, most people think, deserve to suffer the consequences of their folly anyway.

So, the hangover is here to stay. The best thing to do about it, then, particularly as Sunday morning at Tales of the Cocktail rolls around, is get together for morning-after drinks with a room full of other bleary-eyed sufferers at Paying the Piper: Your Hangover and You.

Attendees will be in the learned and compassionate hands of moderator Wayne Curtis, Atlantic Monthly drinks correspondent and author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. We’ll also be subject to the tough love of panelist John Myers, a “saloonist” from Portland, Maine, and co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail. (A surefire way to get a hangover is to accompany Myers for drinks at Portland’s Commercial Street Pub.)

I asked Curtis for a little preview of the session, and he began with an assurance. “At this point, I’m confident in proclaiming some of the things that attendees will NOT be subject to:

Loud and cacophonous music
Bright flashing lights
Mandatory deep thrust squats
Cymbal-banging monkeys
The smell of boiled cabbage
Live demonstrations of [For the sake of those who may actually be reading this with a hangover, I'll leave out what Curtis said about hurling, toilets, and pubes].”

Much appreciated, Wayne.

He adds, “I’m also confident that this WILL be part of the seminar:

Fernet Branca.”

In fact, the Fernet Branca Cocktail, along with the Vampiro and the Bullshot, will be the session’s representatives of the “many drinks reputed to bring morning-after relief.” God, I hope they work. Then again, the suffering that afflicts our bodies during a hangover often carries our minds into the realm of the philosophical and poetic.

Accordingly, “There will also be some discussion of the hangover and literature,” says Curtis, “and a small theory as to why there’s far more great writing about hangovers than there is about being drunk: because one’s hangover is both The Odyssey and The Iliad writ small. The themes: hubris, belief in one’s immortality, the abrupt correction of this belief, one’s generally unsuccessful fight to return home, and the comeuppance of the hero, who is now required to crawl on all fours like an infant or a geriatric.”

I’ll gladly crawl on all fours to the Hotel Monteleone at 10:30 on a Sunday morning to spin such gold out of my hangover.

Anyone who thinks media coverage of bartenders and cocktails is part of some new trend did not attend this morning’s panel Jerry’s Kids: The Life, Drinks and Legacy of Professor Jerry Thomas. (Check out a blow-by-blow post on this session by Rick Stutz of Kaiser Penguin.) How did the outsized personalities of Jerry “The Professor” Thomas and William “The Only William” Schmidt become widely known and define the bartending profession in the mid- to late 1800s? Because those guys worked in bars popular with journalists. And journalists, being boozehounds, trumpeted the talents of these men, and printed some of their cocktail recipes, in their broadsheets. There is even speculation that some of Schmidt’s journalist buddies helped him pen his book The Flowing Bowl. There you have it: media coverage has been elevating the careers of bartenders from day one.

This afternoon, I attended the overflowing session The Three Amigos: The Three Most Important Drinks You Need to Know and Why. Amid a lot of lively banter, Simon Ford of Plymouth Gin, bartender-consultants Wayne Collins and Jason Crawley, and Phil Ward of NYC’s Death & Co., conveyed the secret of mixology: every drink in the world derives from one of seven types of old-time concoction: punches, milk punches, slings, cocktails, sours, cobblers and highballs. (Meanwhile, the Three “important” Amigos are, I think, punches, cocktails and sours.) Even drinks that are seemingly hard to classify can be wedged into these notches. Bloody Mary? Well, that’s spirit, fruit and spices: punch. Gin and Tonic — highball, you say? Try cocktail: spirit, sugar (in the tonic), water and bitters (again, the quinine in the tonic).

My favorite part of the panel was when Jason was talking about variations on the cocktail and mentioned the Barbara West (as in “add a little sherry and you have a Barbara West”). That happens to be not only a great cocktail, but my namesake in the Boston chapter of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails.

I was a responsible adult yesterday until about 4:30. I abstained from joining my fellow Yankees in NOLA for lunch at the Napoleon House, because I had to prepare for my panel, How to Get Your City, Bar, Recipe or Bartender More Media Coverage. (Fellow blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler wrote about it here.) Thanks to my excellent panelists Jenny Adams of Nightclub & Bar magazine (and author of Mixing New Orleans), Jeffery Lindenmuth of Food Arts magazine, Men’s Health and many other publications, and Jennifer Baum of the powerhouse PR firm Bullfrog & Baum for making it a very informative 90 minutes. And thanks to all who showed up!

After the panel, I was ready to get loose. I succeeded spectacularly. Not that I needed to try very hard, given that I’m at a cocktail conference. In New Orleans.

My activities were as follows:

* Blogger reception with Cabana Cachaca cocktails
* Plymouth Sloe Gin tasting (yummy stuff)
* Sazeracs and Vieux Carrés at the Carousel Bar
* Beefeater gin reception at the Palace Café, with Audrey Saunders and Josey Packard mixing cocktails behind a bar carved out of ice
* Dinner at the pork palace Cochon (This culminated in a war of the shots between our table of 11 Bostonians and a bunch of New York guys from PDT. It was cutthroat — we got warm shots of Grey Goose and retaliated with Fighting Cock bourbon laced with grenadine.)
* Daiquiri party at the French 75 bar at Arnaud’s (Many swizzle sticks were obtained.)
* Shots of Averna (in plastic cups) at the Old Absinthe Bar
* After-hours party #1 at the St. Germain suite at the Hotel Monteleone (this involved elderflower-laced cocktails, of course, but also swigs of Averna, Balvenie scotch and some sort of good, aged tequila straight from bottles/flasks that were circulated around the room)
* After-hours party #2 in Jeffrey Morgantheler’s room — Sazerac rye and Carpano Antica Manhattans mixed up in the bathroom. I’m not actually sure if I drank one of these.

Christ, it’s only Thursday.

For those of us who write about and promote drinks and mixology, Tales of the Cocktail is a magical time when we are surrounded by thousands of kindred spirits who want nothing more than to hear about new recipes, great bartenders, and happening bar scenes. But when the party ends and everyone returns to the real world, we face the question: how do we convey that excitement to the media?

The panel I’m moderating this year, “How to Get Your City, Bar, Recipe or Bartender More Media Coverage,” offers a glimpse into the various ways that cocktails and the people who make them become news. The panel is part of the Cheers Professional Series, a special track of sessions (co-developed by Cheers magazine) that address specific needs in the restaurant and bar industry.

Panelist Jenny Adams — freelance writer, contributing editor at Nightclub & Bar magazine and author of Mixing New Orleans, Cocktails & Legends (2007) — says she’ll discuss “how I pitch and the best ways to pitch me on a story. Basically, how to be your own PR company if you can’t afford to hire one.” She’s full of helpful do’s and don’ts, like:

• DO approach all types of press with your story ideas (blogs, Web sites, magazines, newspapers, trade publications, etc.).
• DO include high-resolution photos of what you are pitching (might be shots of your bar, your bottle packaging, your waitstaff in action or a cocktail).
• DO NOT send vague pitches. For example, “My bar rocks. We do 300 people every Monday night for $2 draft pitcher night.” There is no story here.

Jeffery Lindenmuth, a contributing editor on wine and spirits for Food Arts magazine and Beverage Media, will be another repository of concrete advice with “three low- and no-cost keys to better press placement and six ways to improve your pitch.” For show-and-tell, he’ll bring along a “rather humorous” editor-to-writer email (“edited to protect the guilty”) outlining what it takes to get into national magazines.

Speaking of national magazines, Andrew Knowlton, restaurant editor of Bon Appétit, will be on hand to dispense his wisdom. And Jennifer Baum, principal of Bullfrog & Baum, will present the PR professional’s point of view.

Me, I’m the blogger of the bunch. I’ll chime in about my experience launching and promoting a successful blog (drinkboston.com), how that blog promotes the Boston mixology scene, and how I’ve managed to become not only a contributor to but a subject of the media.

Oh, and did I mention there’d be cocktails? Two beauties will be served: the Navan Cocktail #4, created by Gary and Mardee Regan and showcasing a new spirit, Navan Natural Vanilla Liqueur (our sponsor, along with Grand Marnier), and the Jaguar, created by Boston bartender Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli and featured both in the Boston Globe and on drinkboston.com.

Navan Cocktail #4

• 1 1/2 oz Laird’s Applejack
• 1/2 oz Navan Natural Vanilla Liqueur
• 1/2 oz Grand Marnier
• 1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
• 1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake well over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon wheel.

Jaguar

• 1 1/2 oz Milagro blanco tequila
• 3/4 oz Amer Picon
• 3/4 oz green Chartreuse
• 3 dashes Fee Brothers orange bitters

Stir well over ice and strain into cocktail glass. Garnish with flamed orange peel.

How to Get Your City, Bar, Recipe or Bartender More Media Coverage takes place Wednesday, July 16, from 2:30 – 4:00 at the Hotel Monteleone. Tickets may be purchased here.